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The dark art of office politics for IT leaders (part one – why is it stressful?)
Apparently office politics is a horrible thing that other people do. But many of the emerging IT leaders I speak to get told they need to be better at “soft skills” and “influencing at a senior level”. What this often means is get good a politics. Sadly a lot of office politics seems to involve…
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Focusing questions and project charters are great, but where do you start?
I am starting a bunch of small projects at the moment and people are rushing to help define the solutions. That is great but I am (as always) nervous that we are providing solutions before we really understand what we want to solve. I like to define the problem (or vision) and then a rough…
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Who knew the race condition (or racetrack problem) could blow up your project schedule?
Like every other cool project manager these days I like to be agile. But I used to be a pretty good waterfall project manager before I found out how uncool it was. One of the common things I used to do was called “crashing the project schedule”. In fact it is probably the most fun…
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Can I add more scope and still deliver on time? Or should I Scamper
I often seem to face the same problem – how can I reduce my resources, increase my scope, improve quality and go faster? The best answer is – be clear on what you really want and decrease your scope. Sadly that is the opposite of what people want to hear, but usually delivering the right…
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Using a Scrum of Scrums for a remote team – the anticipated outcome
I am working on a project where our team are spread between contries and working on multiple streams of work. We are using agile techniques, but we want to improve our cross team communication. So we are going to have a “scrum of scrums” meeting in addition to our daily scrum in each team. The…
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Going live on agile projects – where is Machiavelli when you need him?
Niccolò Machiavelli is famous for saying things like: “At this point one may note that men must be either pampered or annihilated. They avenge light offenses; they cannot avenge severe ones; hence, the harm one does to a man must be such as to obviate any fear of revenge” I will let you be the…
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Updating the trough of despair – Do projects always double dip?
When I first learned project management we were really into waterfall concepts like crashing the schedule and EVA. In fact I really enjoyed the process of Pert charts and planning. But I stated to notice that many difficult things ended up being deferred to “release 2” then “release 2.1” and then “post-release business as usual”. …
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A prophets of doom workshop
In the past I have used some pretty dodgy approaches to defining risks in a project, from formal approaches like fault tree analysis through to informal approaches like “the evil genius” and “an international standard for being scared“. So this article is not really a new one. It is more a combination of evil geniuses…
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Will the organsiational antibodies destroy your germ of an idea
Many risks in projects are related to one of two things The idea behind the project is a good one, but you have not thought about the wider impact it has on the organisation; or There are risks within the organisation that will impact your project because of the organisation rather than because of your…
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Using a moments of truth analysis to assess a team’s readiness for change
I have previously blogged about a number of approaches to assessing a team’s readiness for change, including the 7-S framework and the arenas of change approach, but today I thought I would explain a less well known approach – the “moments of truth” assessment. Actually I made it up so it is not too well…
James King 